Emile Study Guide

Emile Plot Summary

Preview of Emile Summary:

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is now famous as a thinker and writer. His beginnings and his life were fairly humble despite the impression that his present level of prestige might suggest. He was exposed to people of a variety of social classes. Unlike some, it is evident from his need to defend intellectual pursuits and his criticism of them that he spent much time around what are now called "the working classes." The wish for physical activity and the demands of the sedentary lifestyle are actually addressed.

This work is a treatise on education out of the European tradition. The author was a nonconformist to some degree, a fact which influenced his life greatly. He was known to not have been monogamous. He did maintain long-term, stable relationships, at least one that was not a marriage and another that was one. Rousseau suffered persecution but his...
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